FATHER'S DAY 2011 / 548

Jason Payne/Postmedia News Service

Journalists have described the disgrace in downtown Vancouver following Game Seven of the Stanley Cup. They are unanimously at a loss to explain why a segment of the large group of hockey fans broke down steel fences, broke commercial windows, overturned and burned vehicles, taunted and fought with police, posed for photos in the midst of the mayhem and disregarded law and responsibility. But city officials and law enforcement must understand and explain it in order to avert it in the future, since this is the second time that such humiliation has smeared the city’s history. The last time being the Seventh Game in 1994. Immediate explanations have been that criminals and anarchists came intentionally to use the occasion to break the law and to create a war zone.

But what kind of people are these? What has created the kind of person who can parade such disregard for what is right and good? Religious people will certainly have an explanation. Others do too.

In an interview for Time magazine in 2005, J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, identified the origin of evil in the role of fathers in family life:  “As I look back over the five published books,” she says, “I realize that it’s kind of a litany of bad fathers.  That’s where evil seems to flourish, in places where people didn’t get good fathering.”  (Quoted in TIME July 25, 2005)

Outside the literary genre called fiction, if there is truth to what Rowling says, then many and maybe most of the instigators and participants of the post game looting, destruction and defiance are people whose experience with their fathers was disruptive, obstructive, regrettable. It would be an interesting sociological study when these lunatics are corralled and processed for justice, to learn from them whether their fathers were absent from their lives, whether their fathers lacked respect for authority and law, whether their fathers beat and disrespected them, or whether these were children who were in foster homes during their childhood.

I don’t know what might be done with that study outcome but I do know that with Paul Bayne, his four children, Kent, Baden, Bethany and Josiah will have a father who respects their personhood, encourages the development of their potential, teaches them healthy values and morality because he himself is a man committed to ethics and moral principals that are a basis for a strong life, and family and community. What Paul needs is opportunity to instill such ideals into his children’s lives – opportunity that exceeds a specific number of hours each week under outside supervision. The fact that his value system derives from a commitment to the God of his Christian faith should not be a deterrent to the Ministry of Children and Family Development investing confidence in his capacity to parent.

In any other child welfare case involving a Hindu, or Muslim, or Buddhist, or aboriginal father with profound religious devotion, to assess the parent’s capacity to parent and subsequently subject the father to further psychiatric investigation because of that spiritual fixation, would be perceived as highly prejudicial, invasive and irrelevant and would likely not occur. Yet, wait to see whether Paul’s religious obligations are treated differently because they are devoutly, traditionalist Christian in derivation. It could happen. You will know in July.

The dance of shame by this Ministry of Children has gone on long enough with far too many steps. They have dragged this family around now for almost four years. It is disgraceful. Paul’s and Zabeth’s capacity to parent is undeniably reliable and this will be apparent. It is time to give them the unfettered custody of their own children. Legally, morally and practically it is time. To treat the father’s faith by penalizing him with further counselling or investigation will be regarded as a most scandalous outrage. Why would anyone want to create a scenario whereby one of these children becomes the sort of lout who torches police cruisers for fun? Let these children have their father.

Although you must celebrate it during the Saturday visitation, HAPPY FATHER’S DAY, Paul.